Happy Birthday Belief

This year, my mom asked for a book for her birthday. PRAYER by Tim Keller. Thanks to the wonders of Amazon, I had it shipped to her snowy doorstep half a continent away without setting eyes on it. Her telephone thank yous and rave reviews prompted me to flip through it when I noticed a copy in a Barnes and Noble display. I keep coming back to what I found and jotted down in my journal:

"Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change--the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life. We must learn to pray. We have to."

I'm sending up some prayers this evening by candlelight.

Belief is one of the most beautiful things I know.

Amen and amen.

Close Call

Blowouts are bad.
I'm not talking about fights, Brazilian hair treatments, or Black Friday sales.

While driving down one of the busiest freeways in the world the other night, a tire on my Ford Ranger exploded with a sound like a gunshot.
To be honest, I thought it was my left rear tire. Not until I crossed four lanes of traffic and rolled, on all four wheels, to a stop on the side of the off-ramp to Crenshaw (a place where real gunshots are frequently heard) did I realize it was one of the right tires. I don't know if that's significant or not, but it might be.

Michelin estimates that tire blowouts at high speeds cause 535 fatalities and 2,300 collisions a year. Apparently, drivers' instinctive reactions to blowouts frequently cause vehicles to spin, flip, and roll. So I'm feeling good about some traffic providence, my instincts, and avoiding some statistics, if not avoiding towing and repair charges.


How to Drive Through A Tire Blowout

I think I hit something, but it's hard to say.
Stranded on the side of the road, I shed a few tears of stress and shock, spent a moment regretting my indecision to renew that AAA membership I used to have, remembered that my spare tire was uselessly rusted to the underbelly of the vehicle, and called for back-up while my phone came precariously close to battery death. Thanks to Evan for picking me up, helping figure out the towing situation, and graciously shuttling me around West LA until the auto shop solved my transportation problems for a price. And thanks to Matt for offering me dark chocolate cheerios and first pick of the UCLA mugs to drink my tea out of while we sat on his and Evan's kitchen floor chatting for the first time in maybe a year.

It was one of those nights when I found myself thinking: How did I ever end up in this place? How did history get us all here?
I never would have guessed I'd be in grad school with these blokes, stranded in a city I never dreamed of visiting, doing the diligence I didn't realize mattered so much, confused about the whys and hows and whens and somebodies sometimes, happy to be me in the midst of choices that seem to get harder and matter more.

I feel some object lessons dawning on me as I transcribe all this.